Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Anyone with a perfume habit in America in the twenty-first century knows that awful people will reduce every complex, stunning, fascinating work of art to "baby powder" and "old lady" every day of your life. Here are just a few of the comments I've gotten over the years.

Thursday, December 10, 2015

Perhaps the most important media event of 2015 for me was witnessing the fall of Gawker, who were instrumental in popularizing the brand of shallow, sarcastic, morally demonstrative witch-hunt leftism that has, barring a paradigm shift of massive proportions, spelled the death of my generation. They received intense backlash from the mainstream media earlier this year for outing a CFO of Conde Nast without first thinking through how the story fit into the leftist agenda.
What eventually resulted was that Gawker laid off many employees, drastically increased the amount and pervasiveness of advertising on the site, and shifted focus from pop culture to politics exclusively. By politics, I mean becoming so openly partisan, irresponsible, and mean-spirited that coverage of mass murders is rendered in an excess of Garofalo-sarcastic scare quotes if the perpetrators are Muslim, and anyone that has concerns for national security or their own well-being, anyone disturbed, anyone grieving too openly, is mocked and derided as a wimpy, sentimental Islamophobe.
To Gawker, even mentioning that the perpetrators of the San Bernardino shooting were Muslim is utterly irrelevant, though they love prizing out and displaying any links to Confederate flags, pro-life politics, the NRA, American Sniper, or Rush Limbaugh in white criminals.
In the slow, secretive process of my total divorce from liberalism, the most unsolvable mystery of millennial liberal orthodoxy was the rapturous, ubiquitous multicultural defense of Islam, the Religion of Peace, a far-right totalitarian religious ideology that, among other things, requires the legal subjugation and imprisonment of women and punishes homosexuality with prison sentences and death. This paradox, even more than the virulent campaigning against free speech, the censorship, the anti-man anti-white sneering, the 19th century teetotaler campaigns against a phantasmagoric made-up rape culture, was what made me realize that liberalism was a self-defeating, masochistic, and authoritarian ourobouros eating its own tail.
How anyone can still think of Democrats as the benevolent saviors of mankind in the current climate is beyond me. Liberal orthodoxy dictates that those who insult Islam deserve to die, that they are asking for it. You think I'm kidding? The liberal take on the Charlie Hebdo shooting was that they were asking for it because they did not insult "white people"--I put "white people" in scare quotes because I so detest the way this term is contemptuously bandied around by them--and Christians exclusively. The liberal take on the later Paris shootings was who cares, it was "white people," the same thing happened in Beirut and didn't get enough attention. The liberal take on the San Bernardino shooting is who cares, we have to shelter the precious Muslim community that, every time this happens, does absolutely fucking nothing to condemn it.There is some mechanism in the liberal brain that latches onto manufactured, patently fake controversies that make Christians look absurd like the alleged Starbucks holiday cup controversy or the various gay wedding cake debacles of earlier this year, yet remains willfully oblivious of homosexuals getting thrown off buildings by Islamic extremists,female genital mutilation, and the realities of Sharia law. Anti-Christian blasphemy is so ubiquitous that it looks dated and out of fashion; Austin is overrun with uncreative post-Drag Race queens that adorn themselves with inverted crosses and pentagrams, and American Horror Story (which was, I'll admit, pretty brilliant for two seasons when it had no redemptive message) seems to exist solely to propagate trendy occultism and exact teenage revenge on square Christian parents. Liberals will scoff condescendingly about creationism and maintain that they are atheists and everything should be secular, but they run for cover when faced with inconvenient truths about any of their beloved It's A Small World of "POCs" (pronounced "pock") and "WOCs" (pronounced "wok"). In short, they have no principles, and will crumble and regenerate according to trends. Their bourgeois anti-white ethno-masochism has reached dangerous levels.
Mull this over as you read Oriana Fallaci's The Rage and the Pride and The Force of Reason. She was a brazen, ballsy figure who embodied a particular kind of 20th century journalistic boldness that we won't likely see again. She was willing to make herself an international scourge by sticking to her principles. She was also extremely stylish, and wore Patou 1000, a dry, bitter, and opulent 70s chypre.

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

La Religieuse is ironically the perfume that made me finally "get" Serge Lutens, though it is widely disparaged as dull and underwhelming. I fell in love with the name, concept, and the extra nihilistic and alienating interviews Lutens has given to promote it that incorporate abusive nuns, snow, and purple vestements of pederastic priests. I enjoy how Lutens's inscrutable, un-PC interviews unfailingly embarrass and disturb the mannered, leftist perfume blogger cognoscenti that worship his fragrances. Combined with how the perfume itself is a gentle, beautiful jasmine and not the type of gothic pornographic incense bomb that bloggers want and expect from Lutens, the whole endeavor seems designed to troll its audience and I cant help but love it.
I don't know how anyone could find this cheap or common. It does indeed smell like a pure expanse of snow in the manner of Estee Lauder's great Pleasures, buffered by a sweet smoky green rasp that hovers in the background. It doesn't smell like a department store fragrance at all; women don't smell like this anymore. No one wears perfume and if they do it is something garbagey-foody-vanillic. Its name is perfect because I can imagine the wayward nun from Black Narcissus dabbing it on in secret from a tiny bottle labeled "Jessamine Cologne" in kitschy Evening in Paris script. I've been looking for the perfect jasmine and this just might be it.

My first thought on spraying Enchanted Forest was that it smells like Enya. Winter Enya, specifically the "On My Way Home" video where she is Anna Karen-Enya on a snowbound train wrapped in white furs and turban, reliving sepia-toned holiday memories of pine forests and paper lantern Christmas ornaments. Enya is one of my favorite pop artists ever, so the fact that Enchanted Forest conjured the Enya world so effortlessly and effectively pleased me immensely.
There is a wonderfully dirty castoreum-pine effect at the beginning that is like Yatagan. The rest of the perfume is built on a contrast of sour blackcurrant, my favorite perfume fruit, and misty, bitter pine and moss effects. Something I find impressive is how it makes fruit and holiday trappings smell so staid and masculine.
I'd like if the woodsy elements were bolder--more patchouli, more castoreum, more grass--but this is a beautiful and unique perfume for those like me who enjoy bitter blackcurrant of the type found in Magie Noire and L'Ombre dans L'Eau, truly an Eau d'Enya.

Borneo is designed for perfume bloggers with graduate degrees who need Angel repackaged for them and sold at three times the price in order to be freed of associations with loud, ditzy women they've known. The average gun-totin' Walmart-shoppin' blonde Jesus freak might stumble across Angel, but no, they'll never find out about Borneo, or be able to afford it. It smells great, but this sort of precious dainty snob phenomenon is what made me avoid Serge Lutens for years.